Conor Clarke

The stress test's worst case scenario is starting to look like the real world.… More »

Stress-testing top banks has turned out to be a terrific stress reducer. Like a medical patient who takes off on a euphoric binge after the biopsy comes back negative, bank stocks have staged a heady rally, driving a broad recovery in the markets and talk that the end of the recession may be nigh. But the real significance of the stress tests goes deeper. They answer the perplexing long-range question: When the financial system emerges from this crisis, how can it…… More »

I was surprised to see Morgan Stanley on Marc's list of banks that need to raise capital. But this nice little chart from the full stress-test results -- one of the many "adverse scenario" doomsday projections -- helped put that in perspective: … More »

Are here:stressed out.pdf.And released along with the following statement from Ben Bernanke:… More »

Chris Beam -- good friend, perfectly decent roommate -- has a Slate piece arguing that if business interests are going to attack Obama's recent corporate tax proposals, they should avoid all the complicated talk about economics -- "supply chains" and so forth -- and harp on basic issues of fairness. And perhaps they should. But here's my question about this: If by "fairness" we mean "everyone competes on equal tax footing," can a world containing many countries…… More »

Via the Guardian, I see Rupert Murdoch plans to start charging for New Corp newspapers online. I suppose this was coming eventually, but it's still a big deal. Writes Andrew Clark:… More »

I just got off a conference call with Budget Director Peter Orszag in which he talked about the newly released details on the Obama budget. Most of what was under discussion was the $17 billion in new cuts, which has been gently mocked as a drop in the $3.4 trillion ocean of a budget. Orszag's defense was this: "We can no longer afford broken window budgeting." Which meant: Even if the program cuts are small, perpetuating small, crappy programs sends the wrong…… More »

I just got off a conference call with Budget Director Peter Orszag in which he talked about the newly released details on the Obama budget. Most of what was under discussion was the $17 billion in new cuts, which has been gently mocked as a drop in the $3.4 trillion ocean of a budget. Orszag's defense was this: "We can no longer afford broken window budgeting." Which meant: Even if the program cuts are small, perpetuating small, crappy programs sends the wrong…… More »

This statement from the Federal Reserve seems to have the most stress-test preview details. The full, non-leaked results will be posted at 5pm tonight. The banks that needs more capital will have until June 8 to come up with plan, and until November 9 to implement that plan. But I thought this paragraph, tucked into the middle of the release, had a charmingly euphemistic way of suggesting that the banks might also consider firing a bunch of their managers: … More »

The recent news that Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter has become a member of the Democratic caucus has given new life to legislation that many thought had been put to rest for this Congress -- the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA).Last year, I wrote on these pages that I was opposed to this bill because it would eliminate secret ballots in union organizing elections. However, the bill has an additional feature that isn't often mentioned but that is just as troublesome…… More »

This statement from the Federal Reserve seems to have the most stress-test preview details. The full, non-leaked results will be posted at 5pm tonight. The banks that needs more capital will have until June 8 to come up with plan, and until November 9 to implement that plan. But I thought this paragraph, tucked into the middle of the release, had a charmingly euphemistic way of suggesting that the banks might also consider firing a bunch of their managers: … More »

One of the many fun things about Greg Mankiw's blog -- besides the passive-aggressive spats with Paul Krugman -- is that he has an admirably shameless way of shilling for his own textbooks. (See, for example, here, here, here, here, here, here and here -- all pulled very quickly and more or less randomly from the past two months.) I used those textbooks in college and think they're pretty great. But when I read that Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok are releasing their…… More »

Over at his new Atlantic Correspondents blog, Edward Tenner says that America is a land of extremes: We consumers can't get it right, living beyond our means during bubbles when we should be saving, and throttling back in downturns, putting each other and countless people overseas out of work. In January the award-winning British economic journalist Anatole Kaletsky even wrote a column with the ferocious headline "Punish Savers and Make Them Spend Money" -- and a…… More »

Catherine Rampell charts the relationship between a nation's obesity rate and the average number of minutes a resident spends eating each day. The resulting graph has a pleasantly counterintuitive result:… More »

Via Politico, there is a congressional vote later today that is expected to create a commission to look into the causes of the financial crisis -- a commission modeled, roughly, on the 9/11 Commission. Yes, yes, blue-ribbon panels are supposed to be for when you don't want to get anything done. But this time everyone is promising that they really, definitely, want to get something done. For sure. From the report:… More »

I'm not sure there are two words that can summon the specter of government oppression quite like "double taxation." If the government gets to double dip in your wallet, what won't it do? And for exactly this reason those words being deployed against the administration's plan to close various loopholes on the taxation of foreign business income. A small problem with this strategy is that it turns out not to be true.… More »

The Federal Reserve plans to deliver results of stress tests on U.S. banks to executives today that may show about 10 companies need additional capital to weather a deeper recession, people familiar with the matter said.Banks are formulating plans for filling their capital requirements, much of which would likely come from conversions of preferred shares, the people said. Many of the 19 lenders under review and the government are set to discuss publicly the…… More »

Why new details about AIG don't revive the populist anger.… More »

Richard Florida, like Richard Posner, has a new blog on the Atlantic website. His first post is about a new Pew poll on American consumption patterns that Felix Salmon and the Economist and others have also commented on. Writes Florida:… More »

Since, as Ryan Donmoyer and others have reported, the business lobby is gearing up for a big fight over the president's proposed changes to the corporate tax, I am going to try to be somewhat diligent about tracking arguments for and against the proposal. ("This is going to be the biggest fight for the corporate community in the next two years," says one lobbyist.) And a post over at Cato's @Liberty blog does such a wonderful job of misrepresenting Obama's plan…… More »